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Putting 'America' on the Map

It's easy to think of reasons why the Library of Congress has bought the first map to use the name ''America,'' even if that map, at $10 million, is the single most expensive item ever purchased by the library. In its day, 1507, the world map compiled by Martin Waldseemüller was a technological tour de force, a masterpiece of woodcut printing as well as cartography. Though a thousand maps were originally made, the Waldseemüller now exists in only a single copy, which was rediscovered in 1901 in a southern German castle. The map is the first to correctly show that America is a separate continent, and the name ''America'' -- a tribute to the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci -- is printed across what we now call Brazil.

The Library of Congress has been trying to acquire the Waldseemüller map since 1903, and when Prince Johannes Waldburg-Wolfegg, the owner, agreed to sell it in 2001, the library leaped at the chance. But the sale, whose completion was announced Wednesday, has been attended by some unfortunate ironies. One is the deterioration in relations in the last six months between the United States and Germany. The map was registered on the list of important German cultural property, which meant that to complete the sale, export licenses had to be granted by the Federal Republic of Germany and the German state of Baden-Württemberg. When the impending sale was first announced, it was intended to celebrate the library's bicentennial, as well as the warm relations between the two countries.

But perhaps the most important irony is the simple fact that Congress has put up $5 million of the purchase price just as budgets of America's public libraries have been cut to the bone and beyond. The Waldseemüller map is unquestionably an important part of America's birthright, even if the oft-repeated claim that it is ''America's birth certificate'' doesn't make much logical sense. The map is clearly the capstone of the Library of Congress's cartographical collection, and its historical value is consistent with the century-long effort to acquire it. But its symbolic value must also be balanced against the public literacy that is America's real birthright, one that resides in our public libraries, which are now in a state of fiscal crisis.